[OpenWireless Tech] Germany Court ruling affects open wifi

[Brad Knowles]

Unfortunately, this is not surprising -- in Europe, it is not uncommon for ISPs to be held liable for any content found on their servers, regardless of how it got on there. So, don't run web proxy servers, if you don't want to be considered a criminal because one of your customers surfed to a web page that would be considered hateful but legal in other jurisdictions.

We ran into this problem all the time when I was working at Belgacom Skynet, the largest ISP in Belgium. We had our own team of censors that would constantly monitor all popular content on the servers (based on weblog activity) and would pro-actively remove content and shut accounts down, if we found anything that might get us in trouble with the police.

-- 
Brad Knowles
Sent from my iPad

On Nov 24, 2012, at 6:03 PM, Christian Huldt <christian at solvare.se> wrote:

> But wouldn't that open for an analogy with snailmail and open the mail service for liability for any "terrorist threats" etc?
> I firmly believe that this should be overthrown at a higher level, but don't trust the EU enough to want to gamble...
> 
> 
> Natanael skrev 2012-11-24 19:36:
>> The way the article describes it, Tor outproxies would be liable too.
>> I2P and all other networks like it too, even Gnunet.
>> 
>> He is essentially saying that the messenger is liable for the contents
>> of the message even if he can't know what it is. Which means that to
>> avoid liability you can't pass on messages you don't know is legal.
>> 
>> Steganography, anyone?
>> 
>> Den 24 nov 2012 19:17 skrev "Sam Gleske" <sam.mxracer at gmail.com
>> <mailto:sam.mxracer at gmail.com>>:
>> 
>>    https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-file-sharing-ruled-illegal-by-german-court-121123/
>> 
>>    For those concerned about legal ramifications of running an open
>>    Wi-Fi access point a German court has ruled that the owners of the
>>    network are responsible for their users.
>> 
>>    This affects the open wireless movement.
>> 
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